Recent News

• April 2026: Delivering the Griffin Lecture at U Melbourne.
• November 2025: presenting joint work with Ewan Racliffe and Leo Burzstyn at U Chicago Behavioral Economics Conference.
• September 2025: presenting research with Guo Xu at the U Chicago AI in Social Science Conference.
• August 2025: Talks at the Econometric World Congress: "American Life Histories" and panel session on publishing in economics.
• May 2025: Talk at the Brown Long-Run Growth Conference.
• April 2025: Podcasts with Steve Davis and Tim Philipps on "American Life Histories"
• April 2025: Talks at Harvard and BU.
• March 2025: Talks in Utrecht, Stockholm, and Brown.
• February 2025: Talk at the Econ Hist Group in Oxford.
• February 2025: Talk at EIEF, Rome.
• November 2024: Talk at the PE Group in Oxford.
• November 2024: Talk at U Bocconi.
• September 2024: Presenting "American Life Histories" at the Becker-Friedman Conference on AI in the Social Sciences.
• July 2024: NBER-SI talk on "American Life Histories".
• June 2024: Talk at LUISS, Rome.
• May 2023: Upcoming talks at U Chicago and NWU-Kellogg.
• April 2023: Upcoming presentation on "Image(s)" at the NBER Cultural Economics Spring Meeting.
• March 2023: Giving a seminar at UNSW, Sydney.
• March 2023: Visiting Monash Business School in Melbourne.
• January 2023: The Economist features two of my papers (Technology adoption during the Napoleonic wars & Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution).
• January 2023: FAZ Wirtschaftsblog features Bruno Caprettini's, Alex Trew's and my paper on labor shortages in wartime and technology adoption.
• January 2023: Keynote at the First Bolzano Workshop on Historical Economics.
• January 2023: Stephan Heblich and I are on VoxEUTalk about our slavery paper.
• December 2022: Steve Redding is on TradeTalks about our slavery paper.
• September 2022: Elected as a Fellow of the Econometric Society.
• July 2022: I am going to give a keynote at the Association of Comparative Economic Studies Summer School in London on "The End of the End of History", in July 2022.
• May 2022: My paper (with Bruno Caprettini) on "New Deal, New Patriots" has been accepted at the Quarterly Journal of Economics, subject to final revisions.
• April 2022: I am presenting new work on "Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution" at the Brown Conference on the Roots of Comparative Development, Brown, May 7-8, 2022.
• March 2022: I am presenting work on technology and labor demand at a British Academy conference on "Technology and the future of labor" in London, March 25, 2022.
• February 2022: Congratulations to Bruno Caprettini, who is going to join the Economics Department at University of St. Gallen as a tenure-track Assistant Professor.
• February 2022: Congratulations to Anna Becker (UCL), who is going to join the Economics Department at the University of Stockholm as a tenure-Track Assistant Professor (I had the pleasure of being her external advisor).
• September 2021: Podcast interview with Sean Kenny for Economic History Podcasts about "Experiments in Extremism".
• September 2021: Podcast interview with Tim Philips for VoxTalksEconomics on "Going Viral: Propaganda, Persuasion and Polarization in 1932 Hamburg".
• August 2021: Interview for German TV documentary on "parties, boom and pandemics".
• August 2021: Our paper on failing banks and Hitler's rise to power is now forthcoming in the Journal of Finance.
• July 2021: I am delivering the 2nd Annual Crafts Lecture at the Warwick Summer School, July 13th.
• June 2021: Our paper on the rivalry and the performance of German fighter pilots (joint with Leo Bursztyn, Philip Ager, Lukas Leucht) is now forthcoming in the Review of Economic Studies. [VOXEU]
• March 2020: Interviews with Der Spiegel, and Cash about the Corona crisis.
• March 2020: The Economist profiles my work on pandemics in the past and economic growth.
• February 2020: Finanz und Wirtschaft and VOXEU carry an article by me on comparisons between the Corona crisis and plague outbreaks in the past.
• October 2019: Bruno Caprettini's and my paper on the Captain Swing riots is conditionally accepted at American Economic Review: Insights. [VOXEU]
• August 2019: Guo Xu and I have a new working paper on the Royal Navy "Patronage for Productivity: Insights from the Age of Sail" [VOXEU]
• August 2019: Jacopo Ponticelli's and my paper on "Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2008" is forthcoming in the Journal of Comparative Economics.
• June 2019: I am the keynote speaker at the Australasian Public Choice Conference, Brisbane, December 2019.
• March 2019: I am going to deliver a keynote at the 1st Economic History Conference in Bologna.
• December 2018: Sebastian Doerr, Stefan Gissler, Jose-Luis Peydro and I have a new working paper "From Finance to Fascism: The Real Effect of Germany 1931 Banking Crisis" [VOXEU]
• September 2018: I am delivering a keynote at the GEP Conference on Economic Integration, Nottingham.
• March 2018: Congratulations to Bruno Caprettini, who just won a Mercator Award at the University of Zurich.
• April 2017: The SNF just awarded Bruno Caprettini and me CHF 1,000,500 for our project "Wages and Veteran Status: The Greatest Lottery in History".
• May 2017: I am going to be the Scientific Director at the UBS International Center for Economics in Society, University of Zurich, from August 2017.
• January 2017: Philipp Ager, Leo Burzstyn, Lukas Leucht and I have a new working paper "Killer Incentives: Status Competition and Pilot Performance during World War II". [VOXEU]
• September 2016: I will be a keynote speaker at the Winter Meetings of the Econometric Society in Barcelona, December 2017.
• May 2016: Peter Koudijs' and my paper on "Leverage and Beliefs" is forthcoming at the American Economic Review
• March 2016: I will be visiting UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business as a Baxter Fellow for the academic year 2016-17.
• February 2016: Congratulations to Nico Voigtländer for getting tenure at UCLA-Anderson!
• November 2015: I have been appointed to the UBS Professorship in Macroeconomics and Financial Markets.
• September 2015: Shanker Satyanath's, Nico Voigtländer's and my paper on the dark side of network capital and the rise of the Nazi party, called "Bowling for Fascism", is now forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy.
• July 2015: I will be delivering the Sir John Hicks Lecture in Oxford in the spring of 2016.
• The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is publishing "Nazi indoctrination and anti-Semitic beliefs in Germany" (with Nico Voigtländer) [news coverage here].
• March 2015: Congratulations to my PhD students Felipe Valencia, Andrea Matranga, and Jörg Stahl. They will take up tenure track positions at U Bonn, the New School in Moscow, and the Universidade Nova in Lisbon, respectively.
• December 2014: Congratulations to my PhD student Vasiliki (Vicky) Fouka, who just received an offer to join the Stanford Political Science Department as an Assistant Professor next fall.
• October 2014: Starting in June 2015, I will be an editor at the Economic Journal.
• October 2014: The Review of Economic Studies is publishing "State Capacity and Military Conflict" (with Nicola Gennaioli).
• September 2014: The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) just awarded 500,000 CHF for my research project "Debt into Growth: How the Country that Borrowed the Most Industrialized First".
• September 2014: Swiss Radio has an interview with me and an article about my views on Catalan independence.
• July 2014: I will be a columnist for Finanz und Wirtschaft, the Swiss financial newspaper. The first article is about bubbles and monetary poliy.
• July 2014: I am teaching at the Tsinghua University Summer School in Quantitative Economic History in Beijing.
• June 2014: I am delivering a keynote address at the LACEA political economy conference in Bogota.
• May 2014: The Wall Street Journal Germany and Marketwatch cover my paper on "Recreating the South Sea Bubble" (with Giovanni Giusti and Charles Noussair).
• May 2014: Nico Voigtländer and I have a new working paper called "Highway to Hitler" [CEPR] [SSRN] [VOX]
• April 2014: The Economist highlights my research on time use in the past. [also in the Daily Telegraph]
• February 2014: The Economist covers my research on risk aversion with Peter Koudijs [NBER] [CEPR] [SSRN] [VOX].
• January 2014: I have taken up my new position as Chair of Economic Development at the Economics Department, University of Zurich.
• January 2014: My book with Mauricio Drelichman Lending to the Borrower from Hell has been published by Princeton University Press.
• August 2013: The Financial Times today has an article by Mauricio Drelichman and me on lessons from Habsburg Spain for sovereign lending.
• July 2013: I am teaching at the Warwick Summer School in Economic Growth, July 7-12.
• June 2013: Shanker Satyanath, Nico Voigtländer and I have a new working paper entitled "Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party in Weimar Germany. [coverage in Slate]
• March 2013: The Review of Economics and Statistics is publishing Numeracy and the Impact of High Food Prices in Industrializing Britain, 1780‐1850 (joint with Joerg Baten and Dorothee Crayen).
• January 2013: I have just become an editor (with Bill Collins) of Explorations in Economic History.
• December 2012: Peter Temin's and my book Prometheus Shackled is now out with OUP (Jan 2013).
• November 2012: How the West 'Invented' Fertility Restriction [with Nico Voigtländer] is forthcoming in the American Economic Review.
• October 2012: The Review of Economic Studies is publishing Horsemen of Riches: War, Plague and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe [with Nico Voigtländer].
• August 2012: The Quarterly Journal of Economics has published Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany [with Nico Voigtländer].
• March 2012: Mauricio Drelichman's and my paper on Lending to the Borrower from Hell: Debt and Default in the Age of Philip II is now out in the Economic Journal.
• October 2011: The EHS has finally managed to put up the video of my April 2011 Tawney lecture.
• September 2011: Mauricio Drelichman and I just won the Explorations Prize for our article "Serial Defaults, Serial Profits: Returns to Sovereign Lending in Habsburg Spain, 1566-1600", Explorations in Economic History 48(1) 2011.
• Summer 2011: I have been asked to become an Associate Editor at the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
• Spring 2011: Congratulations to my doctoral student Peter Koudijs, who will take up a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor at the Finance Department, Stanford GSB, in July 2011, and who is also one of the first European PhDs to join the RES tour.

Other News

• CNN has an op ed piece by me about parallels between the Dutch revolt and the independence movement in Catalonia.
• The Wirtschaftswoche has an article by me about historical experiences with currency unions.
• The Economic Focus in the Economist features my paper with Tim Leunig on process innovation.
• The Economist just made my unrest paper with Jacopo Ponticelli the topic of the Economics Focus column.
• CNN ran an op-ed piece of mine comparing Greece and Argentina in 2001.
• Der Spiegel - August 29, 2011 edition - has an interview with me about the future of the Euro [print edition, (poor) English translation here].